Concepts

These are various concepts relevant to understanding how portmod works. It is recommended that you familiarise yourself with them before using Portmod.

Keywords	Keywords indicate the stability of game engines (architectures) for a given package.
Sets	Sets are short forms for collections of packages.
Use Flags	Use flags are the primary method of configuring portmod’s packages.
Profiles	Profiles are default game configurations for portmod.
Sandbox	The portmod sandbox allows safe access to dangerous functions such as shutil.rmtree while still allowing pybuilds to be as pythonic as possible.
Configuration Protection	For certain files in the prefix, and all files outside the prefix, portmod will not blindly overwrite them when installing, and will not allow modules to overwrite them. This helps nicely handle changes to files the user has manually modified.
Modules	Modules can be used to run global updates after package installation has been completed. This is often used to update configuration files to inform game engines of the locations of the mods which have been installed,